'Final Destination 3' follows working formula

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Roger Moore THE ORLANDO SENTINEL

Published 1:00 am, Friday, February 10, 2006

Might this be the final "Final Destination?" Don't bet on it.

What we have in "Final Destination 3" is the perfect movie formula. Kid gets intuition about an accident that will happen, freaks out, and saves several peers from certain death. Then, death kills off those survivors.

And we have the perfect business model. Legions of unknown young actors are shredded with every installment, with no repeat cast members forcing up the casting costs.

That adds up to the perfect movie-killing and money-making machine.

"X-Files" vet
James Wong
returns to his 2000 creation for this sequel, which at least has some of the wit and weight of that first film, and a clever plot touch. This time, it's not kids about to board a plane that blows up. It's kids about to clamber aboard a rickety roller coaster that will do what we all fear a coaster will do - impale, decapitate, and crush bodies into goo.

It's senior night at someplace that can't possibly be Disney World, and Wendy, played by
Mary Elizabeth Winstead
of "
Sky High
," is shooting digital pictures for the yearbook. But just as her boyfriend and another couple are nagging her into riding The Devil's Flight coaster, she "sees" the accident about to happen.

She gets hysterical, creates a scene. Her best friend's beau, Kevin (
Ryan Merriman
) gets off with her, as do a couple of other reluctant classmates. The ride shoots off, and the rest die horribly.

And that's just the beginning. "Death's grand design," as they referred to it back in the original, will not be denied. The survivors are doomed. And since they can go on the Internet and realize that this has happened in two earlier movies, well, it's all about waiting to die.

The weight of these movies comes from their grasp of the flippant sense of immortality of teenagers, and how they react to death. Some, such as Lewis the jock (
Texas Battle
), are in denial. The atheist (
Kris Lemche
) dismisses the whole idea. Kevin and Wendy seem to straddle the fence between fighting their fate or accepting it.

Wong puts lots of effort into showing chain reactions - the maintenance issues, careless employees, bad drivers and the rules being broken by callous teens that lead to sudden, gruesome death.

His co-written script can crack "If you ever have to come to my funeral" and intellectualize what the kids are going through.

"If there's any place that makes you feel there's no life after death, it's a cemetery."

He can put a couple of cliched Barbies into tanning beds (naked) and murder them, but he can't make us care enough to laugh or wince. He can have a kid who openly questions Christianity kill pigeons with a nail gun, but he can't make him interesting or menacing. He has no heart.

All Wong is up to is setting another trap, staging another crash-smash, slicing or squishing. Maybe that's why he's been sentenced to "Final Destinations." The punishment fits the movie-making crime.